THEY say no one is irreplaceable, but what the hell do they know? Ian Bell certainly comes pretty damned close.

It is a cliche which I hope my friend would forgive, for he was a writer of such quality he had no need of them, but awaking to news of Ian’s death really did feel like a kick in the guts, leaving me winded, wounded, shocked.

I cannot imagine how his wife Mandy and son Sean are coping with the suddenness of his leaving.

For wider Scottish journalism and beyond that, literary Scotland, he is an immense loss. Those plying the trade, particularly as members of the oft-derided “commentariat”, will know the undisputed heavyweight champion has hung up his gloves.

Two of his latest contributions were a typically forensic take-down of Hilary Benn’s pro-bombing speech in the Commons, which exposed its empty rhetoric and lack of logic, and a beautifully crafted tribute to his great friend, Willie McIllvanney.

That now, just days later, we are having to grope for words to pay passably eloquent tribute to Bell himself, suggests the fates are not favouring Scotland this week. I say passably because I could never look back on anything I have written by way of commentary or analysis without thinking Bell would have put it better.

Both Edinburgh boys but from opposite sides of the city’s sporting divide, I was the Hearts journeyman, but I wasn’t up against Hibs. More like Barca. Yes, the Iniesta of Scottish journalism, slide-rule metaphors and rapier thrusts. That sounds about right.

We were in the features department of The Scotsman in the early eighties and it soon transpired that although he was a gifted sub-editor, he was a supremely good writer and he became literary editor. Scottish politics had taken a sabbatical after the 1979 referendum and we shared a mutual distaste for the direction of UK politics of the time.

There was a depressing night in his flat watching the 1983 Conservative landslide results come in, enlivened by Ian constantly pinging the television screen with a toy ball-bearing gun whenever grinning Tories appeared, and cheered towards dawn only when carpet-bagging Iain Sproat lost the “safer” Borders seat he had moved to, only for his successor Gerry Malone to cling on in Aberdeen South.

The following year, Home Secretary Leon Brittan, fresh from militarising our police to crush the miners, was the subject of rumours for the first time about paedophilia allegations and a group of us headed for Le Sept restaurant to celebrate the imminent downfall of the Thatcher Government. We returned from many toasts to discover it had all gone mysteriously quiet.

Only decades later did it emerge that he had indeed been handed a dossier of such allegations at that time but the document conveniently disappeared. Our celebrations had been premature.

In discussion with Ian on virtually any topic, it soon became clear that he knew more about it than you did, had read more widely, thought more clearly, even if the debate was held in a hostelry, as was not unknown. You would await the end of any slight pause for his stammer, knowing what was coming would be worth it.

We both moved on from a rapidly changing Scotsman and ended up on The Herald, where Ian hit his stride as a brilliant columnist and leader writer, someone many of us turned to first, before he also began writing for the newly launched Sunday Herald.

I wish Ian had written a great novel, perhaps set in Victorian/Edwardian Edinburgh in the time of his great-grandfather John Connolly and his brother James. As Bell said in his biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dreams of Exile: “Had he lived, Louis would have sealed his greatness.”

And as a pre-eminent Scottish journalist, literary critic, biographer of RLS and Bob Dylan, we might say the same of Ian Bell.

Nicola Sturgeon leads tributes to ‘one of Scotland's finest writers' following sudden death of Ian Bell